A Northern Wind
Discussion
The latest in the series of books describing post war Britain , by David Kynaston . This is a huge book of almost 700 pages , yet covers only the period 1962 -65 . And it has been a joy to read , utterly fascinating , because this is not the conventional social history but relies instead on countless period records- from BBC archives, to press local and national and (most of all ) from personal recollections made at the time - often diary entries , and of anyone from school kid to a peer, woven into a narrative of events - from Harold Wilson winning the general election, the Cuban Missile Crisis . the night when the Stones appeared on Juke Box Jury , and accounts of dockers on strike in Liverpool .
I was a kid at the time , but old enough to remember the shock of Kennedy's death or the seismic joy of hearing the Beatles sing She Loves You for the first time . But the big impact of the book was to remind me of what an utterly different world it was . Attitudes which are repellent to every right thinking Brit now - rampant racism ('if you want a n**** for neighbour , vote Labour' was one infamous election slogan ) , awful standards of living in industrial areas , social deference, trade union power and most of all, off the scale sexism .
Not much car stuff but this bloody gem - a motoring correspondent for an unnamed newspaper lavished the Vauxhall Viva HA with praise, mentioning how his wife had driven it 610 miles in a day 'without fatigue' . There's a whole novel in the background to that story .
A fabulous book which explains a lot about why are what we are - and where we once used to be .
I was a kid at the time , but old enough to remember the shock of Kennedy's death or the seismic joy of hearing the Beatles sing She Loves You for the first time . But the big impact of the book was to remind me of what an utterly different world it was . Attitudes which are repellent to every right thinking Brit now - rampant racism ('if you want a n**** for neighbour , vote Labour' was one infamous election slogan ) , awful standards of living in industrial areas , social deference, trade union power and most of all, off the scale sexism .
Not much car stuff but this bloody gem - a motoring correspondent for an unnamed newspaper lavished the Vauxhall Viva HA with praise, mentioning how his wife had driven it 610 miles in a day 'without fatigue' . There's a whole novel in the background to that story .
A fabulous book which explains a lot about why are what we are - and where we once used to be .
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